I love watching movies. Who doesn’t? But my cinematic preferences are quite disjoint with my wife’s. This is a bit annoying, because one of the fun things about watching movies is talking about it! Especially if the movie is insufferably lame. Let the sarcastic remarks flow! Watching alone, for me at least, takes a lot of the enjoyment out of the experience.
So what to do when you want to watch Dune for the 67th time, but there is no one around to watch with? This is the age of social-everything, so why not watch with your online friends? Make inappropriate comments, pause, rewind and slow-mo the scene of the exploding head, talk about how old the leading man looks and how hot the cyborg sex-pot leading lady is.
How might you do this online, in a social networking style experience?
Well, first of all, you need the movie to stream. Let’s just ignore this problem for now and assume that we’re Hulu or Amazon or Netflix…we’ve got the content and the ability to stream it.
To kick things off, I invite a bunch of my online friends to join my “virtual theater”, where tonight at 8pm, we’ll be watching Strange Brew. I do this via Twitter or Facebook or whatever. The invitation includes a web link which directs them to a virtual lobby where we all gather and wait for the show to start. During this time, we can chat about the movie about to be shown or whatever…chit chat.
Now, at precisely 8pm, the movie starts. Everyone that was invited is now watching the movie, which is streaming to each of our computers and is synchronized so that we’re all watching the exact same scenes at the exact same times. This is critical.
While watching the stream, we’re also watching each other. Each user’s webcam and microphone is streaming upstream so that we can see and hear each other. When a scene is funny, we all laugh together. When it’s scary, we all scream together. Just like we would be in the theater or in your apartment. Fun, right?
Of course, you can easily imagine this being extended to television shows and sporting events.
Somebody. Please. Steal this idea.
We actually do this already in our “Realtime Virtual Classroom”. It does audio, and when bandwidth allows, we do video too. Presentations, not movies, are shown and all the students/participants can comment, make snide remarks and cheer as the presentation happens, just like in a lecture hall. We are also extending this to work off mobile phones, so that should rock hard too. I like the idea of movies as well, but the inevitable cease and desist from some studio fatcat will be an issue. Maybe we can look at the community TV stations etc first?
Awesome!
Yeah, the content is the hard part. But I can totally see Netflix or Amazon doing something like this.
On the other hand, is it that different than having friends over to watch a movie on TV? Assuming that you invite “friends” for a private viewing, and not the entire web, you might be okay. But then the streaming bandwidth becomes your problem. No idea how it works in SA, but upstream bandwidth generally sucks for most people here in the US.
You should post a link to your software/docs. I’d be interested in reading about how you implemented it all.
Upstream is hard, but we have hacked up some of the more robust protocols to do it. Things like Speex and GSM are useful when used very creatively. This year, we apparently are getting way more into true(r) broadband, so we could see a change around there.
Most of what you need to get started is here: http://cvs2.uwc.ac.za/trac/chisimba/browser/modules/trunk/realtime
There is some other in deep dev still though that is hosted somewhere else as far as I know.
A screenshot and a short blurb here http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=news&action=viewstory&id=gen14Srv6Nme27_5188_1228726341 and a set up HOWTO of the presentation sharing system (much like slideshare) is here http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=news&action=viewstory&id=gen14Srv6Nme27_4141_1234886557
If anyone needs more details for any of these things, please contact me!